News: US-Visual Effects Petition

As you probably have heard unless you are living under a rock there is major grumblings in the US VFX communities about job losses and bankruptcy primarily set off by Rhythm and Hues who declared bankruptcy a few months ago at around the same time that their most recent film Life of Pi was passing it’s 1 billion mark in profits. Many of the artists who worked on that film have been laid off without pay and it seems that it has all finally come to a head. Below is a link to petition President Obama do do something about runaway production in the US. Click the pic to be taken to the petition site. Currently there are 3700, signatures and a total of 96,303 are needed as you can see.

As Animation Insider is a global site, we can understand that some of our international readers might question why they should care, and I would say regardless of where you live, you should be paid fairly for your services. No one should be laid off without pay if others have profited billions from their talent. I urge you all to share this petition so that these people can get their fair share and we can stop the visual effects community from being pawns of the studios.

The last sentence really sums it all up:

No matter how successful or efficient our work is, we are ultimately at the mercy of the next government willing to distort prices and put the companies we work for out of business. We want to end the race to the bottom so we can compete on a level playing field and begin the race to the top.